HN Explorer

Ask HN: Am I being unreasonable?

6 points by fspear ↗ HN
I've been in my current company for 2 years now and recently embarked on a new project and a new team within the company, this is a "big data" shop but the current focus seems to be on "platform provisioning" and devops.

Our manager has been tasked with coming up with new "standards", tools and processes for everything.The team has been divided and a new "leadership" team has been formed and the existing developers have been sort of left out, one of the things that really bothers me is the over complexity and artificial constraints being enforced, it's not that I'm not open to change but as I've grown older and experienced (and I have to admit, cynical) whenever I see unnecesary complexity I run away screaming.

Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about: The deployment, provisioning and packaging workflow that these guys have come up with is an absolute nightmare form my point of view, consisting of multiple ansible & gradle scripts, packaging everything as RPM files, convoluted code review processes using crucible, and git branching strategy based on jira tickets, etc, etc this is a standard that must be followed for EVERYTHING, have a simple 3 line bash script? oh you have to write a gradle build file, "tests" and ansible scripts to provision it.

I have to admit I absolutely loath devops but this seems to me like it will be extremely difficult to maintain in the long run, we are also now being forced to use python (we are/were mainly a scala shop) so we cannot leverage existing code as everything we've done before is considered "garbage" or using the more politically correct term, "legacy". What really pisses me off is that we keep getting shut down, and everytime we raise a concern we keep getting told that we are not "real" software engineers and that we must skill up.

Since I am NOT an ansible/devops guy I have to ask before I rage quit:

Am I being unreasonable? am I taking this too personally?.

6 comments

[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] thread
stanleydrew
You're not being unreasonable. But you also don't need to "rage quit."

It sounds like the culture is shifting in a direction that doesn't fit with the way you'd like to work. Time to move on, simple as that.

fspear
Thanks for that, the reason for rage quiting is more to do with the fact that the existing dev team is getting excluded and all of our concerns are shut down and, I hate to pull the "race" card, but it "just" so happens that the majority of the existing devs are migrants/minorities, whereas the new "leadership" team is not.

It feels like we are being treated like children and stuff like not being "real" software engineers coming from people who have contributed 0 to the existing code base really angers me (I am a very emotional/passionate person though).

stanleydrew
I am very emotional at times too, especially when I feel an injustice has been done. I don't know your current circumstances, but I would advise not to read into this leadership change too much. Especially in racial terms.

It sounds like the incoming team indeed thinks of itself as superior in some respect. That's a dangerous way to think (regardless of whether race is involved), because they won't be able to learn anything if they've already disregarded the thoughts of those that were around before they showed up.

It also sounds like they are a bit more conservative ("convoluted code review processes... based on jira tickets") and perhaps a bit more authoritarian ("standard that must be followed for EVERYTHING").

Those may or may not be traits that the company needs to succeed at this point in time, but you're certainly not required to accept them or agree with all of them.

And you shouldn't be made to feel like a child if you've built the foundation of the product. It is disrespectful.

So you just need to ask yourself whether its worth it to try to work with them or just move on.

fspear
Thanks for your sincere advice and I have to admit I admire your "eloquence", not a native English speaker so I'm not sure this is the right word, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really really like the way you worded your understanding of the situation...
flukus
What problems where they trying to address but adopting all of this?

Most of it doesn't seem to unreasonable at it's core, just too extreme.

fspear
"Security" is being used as an excuse.